


The Next Few Thousand Years

by genteelrebel



Category: Dark City (1998), Highlander: The Series
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-07 23:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14091660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genteelrebel/pseuds/genteelrebel
Summary: The Strangers got far more than they bargained for when they took Methos to be a part of their Dark City.





	The Next Few Thousand Years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Celebrithil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celebrithil/gifts).



After five thousand years of life, Methos was very familiar with the desire to forget one’s past.  If you had asked him before the aliens came, he would, in fact, have said that what they offered sounded like one of his greatest fantasies: the chance to simply delete all memory of his long, long history and start over.  To discover who and what he was in a brand new world, free from the Game and all the many toxic ways being Immortal had shaped him.  He might even have volunteered, if they’d asked.

They didn’t ask.

***

Adam Pierson was standing in Joe’s Bar, contentedly helping his Uncle Joe serve drinks to the late afternoon crowd, when he heard the voice.  It boomed through the room, as unavoidable and compelling as the voice of God.  “Citizens of the City:  Please, step outside.  Please, come into the light.  There are things you must be told.” 

Startled, Adam looked at Uncle Joe.  The wise old bartender frowned, looking around at his customers.  Most of them were doing exactly the same thing, looking around at each other in wonder as they tried to ascertain whether or not anyone else had heard the voice.  After a long moment, Joe undid his apron.  “All right, everyone,” he said, in a tone that brooked no nonsense.  “Let’s do what the man says.  One at a time, please.  We’ll all find out what’s happening together.”

And so Adam, like Joe, untied his apron and left it on the bar, emerging with all the other customers into the sunshine outside the bar.  Later, Adam would remember shivering when the warmth of the sun first touched his face…it had reminded him, for a moment, of the gentle touch from his long-buried mother, something he’d once loved to feel but had honestly never expected to experience again.  But that was ridiculous.  Everyone knew the sun rose and set every twenty-four hours. Adam must have felt its warmth on his skin every day. 

Even if he couldn’t quite remember when that last day was.

In any event, there was little time to wonder about it.  A giant three-dimensional image of dark-haired man, taller than even the highest City skyscraper, was being projected over the City.  Adam thought the man’s eyes looked both haunted and oddly empty, and he shivered again.  “Citizens,” the projection said.  “My name is John Murdock.  I am your champion.  And I am your friend.”

For some odd reason, the assurance that the dark-haired man was his friend didn’t reassure Adam at all.  He felt a touch on his back.  Uncle Joe had subconsciously reached out to him, placed a hand right above his waist…a gesture he’d been making since Adam was a small boy of five or six, and the uncle who’d raised him had often been forced to grab the back of his shirt to keep him from running into traffic or falling down the stairs.  They both looked up, as the giant projection assumed a very grave face.  “I am sorry to say that something of tremendous value has been taken from you all,” John Murdock said.   “But we have been working very hard, Dr. Schreber and I, and I’m pleased to say that at least a few of those stolen things can now be returned.  Please proceed in a calm, orderly fashion to the City center.  There you will be met by several kind and friendly volunteers who will help you to recover what is rightfully yours.” And the giant image blinked away.

At first, there was silence.  Then a babble of conversation, the same confused questions on every pair of lips in the street—who was that man?  What was going on?  But eventually the babble died away.  In fact, an almost eerie silence descended as all the people on their street—Joe’s customers, the old men who had been gathered in Willie’s barber shop next door, and the mothers and grandmothers who had been shopping at the Italian deli across the street—all began to slowly walk toward the center of town. 

It was the strangest thing, really.  The people didn’t all go together, and they didn’t all go at once.  They just moved off, alone or in clumps of two or three, as if that was the direction they’d always meant to go in anyway.  Adam saw one or two people actually try to go up the street instead, away from downtown.  But before they reached the corner, they all stopped, got a slightly puzzled look on their face, and turned around. 

Eventually, the street was empty except for Adam and Uncle Joe.  “I don’t like this, kid,” Joe said heavily.

“Why not?  What’s wrong?”  Adam said.  “Uncle Joe, who was that man in the sky?”

“I don’t know.  But somehow I doubt he means anything good.”

“What do you want to do?  Go back into the bar?”

Uncle Joe smiled sadly.  “I already tried that,” he said.  “The door won’t open.  Neither will the doors to the deli or the barber shop.”  To demonstrate, he attempted to turn the bar’s familiar knob.  It didn’t budge.  “Whoever that man in the sky is, I think he really, really wants us to go downtown.  And somehow, I don’t think he’s going to take no for an answer.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Adam said.  “You probably just locked the door accidently on our way out, Uncle Joe.  Here, let me…”  And he fished his keys from his waistcoat pocket and approached the door. 

But suddenly, there was no door to approach.  The worn wood panel, the tarnished brass knob, the familiar brass letters spelling out “Joe’s”—they all seemed to melt before Adam’s eyes, lifting upwards as they changed into something else.  A bizarre ripping-moving-tumbling sound filled his ears, and suddenly Adam was looking at a solid concrete wall.  There was no door in it at all.  “Oh,” he said blankly.

“Yeah,” Joe said quietly.  “Yeah, somehow it doesn’t surprise me that that’s the way it’s going to be.”  He looked at the wall sadly for a moment, then took the keys from Adam’s unresisting hand.  He laid them down on the street in front of where the door had been, much to Adam’s shock.  “Come on, kid.  We don’t need these anymore.  We won’t be coming back.”

“I don’t understand!”

“Neither do I.  But I know that sometimes…things happen.  Events that are so big ordinary people just don’t matter anymore.  And when those sorts of things happen…well, there isn’t any point in fighting.  You just have to surrender yourself to the tide.”  He laced his arm through Adam’s.  “Come on.  Let’s see what fate holds in store for us.”

And so they walked through the City, Uncle Joe limping, Adam doing his best to support his weight—Joe had left his cane inside the bar--until they joined the huge tide of people also going downtown.  The crowd itself was unusually, even disturbingly, quiet.  Nobody so much as gasped when the streets themselves began to move, throwing up new concrete barriers that thinned the crowd down until they were arranged into one long, winding, single file line; Adam supposed they were all in shock.  They kept moving forward, for what seemed a timeless time.  It was impossible to say how long, because the sun didn’t seem to move at all.  Very, very strange…

At last, though, they came to a gigantic stadium.  Adam had no idea what kinds of games had been played there, which was another thing that struck him as odd.  His uncle owned a bar, after all.  Shouldn’t there have been some kind of local sports team that all their customers rooted for?  Baseball?  Something else?  The barest hint of a memory of something called “boxing” tickled Adam’s mind, then flew away.  But it didn’t matter much.  Whatever the arena had originally been designed for, the same hand that had re-sculpted the streets outside had clearly been at work here too, modifying the huge open floor into a labyrinth for the single file line of people to move through. 

Around the edges of the arena, there were dozens of open cubicles.  Each cubicle contained a desk and a friendly, attractive young woman dressed in a fresh white nurses’ uniform.  As they passed the first unoccupied one of these, the young woman got up from her desk, smiled brightly at Joe, and ran some sort of scanner over his forehead.  “Mr. Joseph D. Pierson,” she read out.  “Wonderful!  Please be seated.  We just have a few preliminaries to go through, then Doctor Schreber will be able to see you right away.”  She took Joe’s arm and started leading him to her desk, then shook her head when Adam would have followed.  “I’m sorry, sir.  I can only help one person at a time.  You’ll have to move along to another nurse further down the line.”

“But…”

“It’s okay, kid,” Joe said huskily.  “There’s no point in fighting.”  He turned around, old hands reaching up to straighten Adam’s collar, and Adam was very disturbed to see tears in his uncle’s eyes.  “If I never see you again…”

“Uncle Joe!”

“No, no, none of that,” Uncle Joe said.  “I’m probably wrong, Adam.  It’s just…this all seems really familiar to me, somehow.  But just in case…”  He finished messing with Adam’s collar, gave his chest a little pat.  “I’ve loved being your uncle, kid.  I have no regrets about our life at all.  Okay?”

“Joe…” Adam began.  But that odd sound filled the air again, making the floor stretch somehow.  It forced Adam’s body back into the line, and there was no time to say anything more.  The last he saw of his uncle, Joe was limping to the chair the pretty young nurse indicated, his shoulders slumped resignedly.  And then the line swallowed Adam completely, and he saw Joe no more.

It wasn’t long before he ended up in a cubical with a nurse of his own, one whose face he knew.  “Mattie?” he said incredulously.  “Is that you?”

The nurse gave him a polite smile.  “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“Yes,” Adam said positively.  “Yes.  You…” And he stopped there.  Because Mattie…beautiful, blonde, kind-hearted Mattie…was a working girl, one of the handful who spent the occasional hour sheltering from the City cold in Joe’s bar.  She and Joe weren’t romantically—or professionally—involved at all.  But the two had a long-standing, understanding friendship, and Mattie had always had a soft spot for Adam.  She’d even once offered, in the kindest, gentlest of ways, to relieve him of his virginity at half her normal rate.  It was an offer Adam had been much too shy to take her up on…in fact, when she’d made it, he’d ended up spilling a tray full of whiskey sours all over his shoes.  But the extra knowing curve to her smile every time she’d seen him afterward had warmed him in ways far beyond the obvious.  “I—you’re Mattie.”

There was no knowingness in her smile now, just a distant, professional politeness.  “That’s right!” she said cheerfully.  “Matilda Hawkins.  I’m afraid I can’t place you, though, sir.”

“I’m Adam.  Adam Pierson?”  Mattie just shrugged.  “Mattie,” Adam said, feeling the pit drop out of his stomach.  “I made you a cup of tea at my uncle’s bar just yesterday.”

“Did you?  That was very kind,” Mattie said.  “Stand still now, sir.  I need to complete this scan.”  She waved her device over Adam’s forehead, then smiled as she read the results.  “That’s right, you are indeed Adam Pierson!  Wonderful!  Please be seated.  We just need to go through a few preliminaries before Doctor Shcre…” A light on the scanner suddenly started blinking red.  “Oh,” said Nurse Mattie.  “How very interesting.  Please stay right there, Mr. Pierson.  Dr. Schreber wanted to be sure to attend to you personally.”

She pressed a button, and a door Adam honestly hadn’t noticed before suddenly opened in the back of the cubicle.  Through it, he got a glimpse of row upon row of surgical tables, each with a human being lying upon it, attended by more of the pretty nurses.  They appeared to be giving their charges some kind of injections…into the brain??? Adam did not get a chance to look long, though, before a man in a white coat wearing a stethoscope around his neck came bounding through the door.  “Yes, Nurse?  You called?  What service can I do you, on this bright and happy day?” he inquired…and then he saw Adam.  His mouth dropped open.  “Oh,” he said vaguely, swaying slightly in his place.  “It’s _you.”_

“The scanner says that you wanted to attend to Mr.  Pierson personally, Dr. Schreber!” caroled the nurse.

“Yes,” said Dr. Schreber.  “Yes, yes, I did.”  And suddenly there was a strange-looking syringe in his hand, the largest Adam had ever seen.  Adam started to back away.

The wall behind him made that indescribable sound again, and a brand new door appeared within it.  A rather good looking dark-haired man stuck his head through it.  With a shock, Adam realized it was the same man that had been in the giant projection.  “Doctor, I wanted to…” he said, and frowned when he saw Adam.  “Is there a problem?”

“No, John.  Not really.  Someone here…”  Dr. Schreber smiled cheerfully at Adam, who would have backed away even farther, except that his shoulders had abruptly slammed into a wall. “…is resisting the imprinting a little, that’s all.”

“Resisting?”  John Murdock seemed alarmed.  “Is he like me, then? Does he have the fingerprints?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Schreber said quickly.  “He’s just frightened.”  Schreber’s unnervingly cheerful smile lit on Adam.  “Which really isn’t all that surprising.”

“Ah.”  The dark-haired man seemed mollified.  “Well, we have no time for fear today.”  He waved a hand, and the wall behind Adam suddenly morphed and flowed and caught him with strong solid cement bands, first around his waist, then around his wrists and ankles.  “Don’t struggle,” he advised Adam.  “I promise, it will all make sense to you soon.”  He nodded at the doctor.  “Come find me when you’re finished with this one, doctor.  I need a word,” he said.  And then he stepped out through the door, which promptly disappeared the moment it was closed.

“I hate it when he does that,” Doctor Schreber said wryly, then turned to Adam.  The syringe loomed large and menacing in his hand.  “John was right,” he said softly.  “It is better not to struggle.  And it will all make sense to you soon.”  His gaze suddenly became piercing.  “To you more than most.  I promise you that.”

Adam struggled anyway…but there was no point.  The wall held him as firmly as if he was a butterfly pinned to cork. The syringe touched his forehead.

And everything went black.

***

He woke up knowing he was Methos. And several other things besides. 

There was, in his memory, a university lecture hall that Methos knew he had never sat in, despite having been a student in countless of lives.  At the lectern in the front stood Dr. Schreber, and he told Methos a great many things.  By the end of the lecture, Methos knew the truth about the City, the Strangers, and their great, epic experiment to understand the nature of individuality.  He knew about the thousands of humans who’d been abducted over the decades to be an unwilling part of that experiment, their memories stolen and rewritten again and again.  He knew what they all had lost… 

Methos opened his eyes.

He was lying on an old-fashioned psychiatric couch in what seemed a comfortable enough office, though he could see no computers or other serious evidence of modern technology.  Dr. Schreber was nearby, sitting in an equally antiquated old leather arm chair, watching Methos with an expression that seemed to combine apprehension with barely repressed excitement. Methos stood up and smiled at Schreber brightly.  Then he slugged him hard across the jaw.

The results were satisfying.  Dr. Schreber went over backwards, along with his chair.  He didn’t seem particularly upset, though.  He just righted himself patiently, fingering his now bleeding lip with a certain amount of wry humor.  “Well,” he said.  “That wasn’t exactly unexpected.  And certainly deserved.”

“You took my memories.”

“Yes.”

“And then you gave them back again.”

“Yes.”  Doctor Schreber cocked his head, looking at Methos with pure, cold scientific curiosity.  “Tell me.  Which do you hate me for more?  The taking?  Or the giving back?”

Methos walked to the window, which looked out upon a sunlit blue ocean, spreading out as far as the eye could see.  His most recent memories of being Young Adam Pierson, working with Uncle Joe in the bar in the City… he could tell, now, that they weren’t quite right, that they didn’t fit into his life as smoothly as they should.  But he could still remember his innocence, his happiness.  And the fact that they were as false as the ocean outside didn’t make their loss hurt any less.  “I don’t know,” Methos said honestly. _“_ I suspect that I will probably end up hating you equally for both.”  He felt both of his hands curl tensely on the battered wood windowsill.  “So. Joe was never really my uncle.”

“No.  He was originally an Auschwitz inmate—the Strangers abducted him straight from the camp.  The two of you never met at all, before you came to the City.” Dr. Schreber looked ever so faintly apologetic. “I am sorry about the confusion, Adam.  I wanted you to be as comfortable as I could make you, so I took the happiest of your memories that I could find, and recreated them for you here.  Gave you the name you bore during the lifetime that had brought you the most joy, then gave you a bar and a Joe to go with it.  Made you into the innocent young scholar that you so fervently wished to be.”

“That I wished to…” Methos repeated incredulously.  For a second, he couldn’t speak, because his mouth was hanging open.  “You absolute idiot. The real Joe Dawson was my _lover._ Not my _relative_.”

“Ah, well, I did the best I could,” Schreber said, with an infuriating shrug.  “I couldn’t allow you and Joe to form a sexual relationship here, you know.  Your memories made it plain just how…intense…your feelings in those kinds of partnerships tend to be.  Such passion would have attracted the Stranger’s attention eventually, and I couldn’t allow that.  Your Immortality—and you are the only Immortal in the City, you know; none of the other abductees even suspect Immortality is possible--would have been too great a prize.  I had to keep you, and it, hidden.”  Schreber smirked the tiniest, most genteel of possible smirks.  “Besides.  Tell the truth.  Wasn’t it nice to be the young one in a relationship for once? The innocent child who had to be cared for and protected?”

Methos didn’t dignify that question with an answer.  If Schreber truly knew him, had rummaged through his every memory and thought, there wasn’t any point in denying it.  “Will he remember me at all?” he asked instead. “This Joe?”

“No,” Schreber said bluntly.  “Believe me, I know how difficult it is to accept.  But you must resign yourself to the truth, hammer it into your mind again and again until it takes.  _The life that you’ve been living here wasn’t real._   Your Uncle Joe only adopted you because I programmed him to.  And after today…he won’t even remember your name.”  Dr. Schreber looked ever so faintly apologetic.  “I am sorry about that.  But it’s the way it must be.  You must be forgotten by all, if I’m going to keep you safe.”

“Safe from whom?”

“Come, come, my friend.  You are more than experienced enough in the ways of the world to answer that for yourself,” Schreber chided.  “From _John_ , of course.”

“Ah.  From Murdock. Yes.”  That too, had been a part of Schreber’s implanted lecture…the man he’d painstakingly shaped with years upon years of imprintings, creating a hero who could choom and beat the Strangers at their own game. Oddly, though, Methos really didn’t have to look at Schreber’s implanted memories to understand why Schreber now considered his former champion to be a threat.  His own experience really was enough.  John Murdock was a man with no history, no connections…and he’d suddenly been given what amounted to super-human power, being the only one left who could choom and control the matter of the City.  “Power corrupts,” Methos said dryly.  “And absolute power corrupts absolutely.  There’s nothing stopping John Murdock from eventually becoming the worst dictator in human history, is there.”

“He is…a hero.”  Schreber seemed to spit out that last word, as if it left a bad taste behind.

“Oh, yes,” Methos said with a humorless laugh.  “He’s exactly what you needed him to be.  A knight with a shining, honorable soul, complete with a lady fair standing by.  Believe me, I know the type.  And so I know that he’ll try to do the right thing, at least to start—he’ll try to run this City with a gentle and benevolent hand.  But he’ll never understand why more…pragmatic… individuals act the way they do, and disappointment will breed.  Especially when his lady finally realizes just how blank and empty her own history is and leaves him to ‘find herself’.  Throw in that absolute power I just mentioned, and it’s all a recipe for utter disaster, in two to ten years’ time.”  Methos turned away from the window, frowning at the still-seated Schreber.  “What the hell was going on today, anyway?  Why were you rounding everyone up?”

Doctor Schreber clasped his hands together.  “John ordered me,” he said tonelessly, “to restore the original personalities and memories of everyone I could.  Which wasn’t many.  Almost everyone’s original memories were destroyed in the final battle…”

“Mine were not.”

“Yours were special.  I had many reasons to store them separately.”  Schreber’s teeth flashed, feral as a wild animal’s.  In that moment Methos knew:  whoever, whatever the good doctor had originally been, he was now just as crazy as the aliens he’d served.  “That was not true of the general population, however,” Schreber continued.  “I was able to restore the true memories of less than one percent.  And even most of those were incomplete.”

“Why round everyone up, then?”

“John wanted them to know the truth of this place.  The Strangers, the true nature of the City…his epic triumph over Mr. Book.” There was another mad flash of teeth.  “I prepared another lecture that was implanted in everyone’s mind.  Much shorter than the one I just gave you.  But the salient points were the same.”

“Fuck,” Methos said reverently.  The true epic proportions of this disaster hit him with all the force of sledge hammer.  “So how many deaths have there been?  Suicides and murders combined?”

“About seventy so far.”

“God.”  Methos shuddered.  “Take a few thousand people and suddenly tell them that their entire existence has been a lie?  Then add that they’ve been kidnapped by aliens who inhabit dead human bodies and are now marooned on a spaceship far, far from earth just for good measure?  People don’t stay sane under those kinds of conditions, Schreber.  I’m honestly surprised the death toll’s been that low.”

“Oh, John was forced to put the entire population to sleep,” Schreber answered cheerfully.  “He is now attempting to wake the survivors in small groups of three or four so he can reason with them.  Beg them to set aside their panic and become…ah…”  Schreber lifted his pale hands, made air quotes.  “’Productive members of society.’”

Methos stared.  “It would have been far kinder to leave them as they were!”

“Kinder, yes.  But abhorrent to John.  He truly believed, ah, that the people Have a Right to Know.”  Schreber shrugged.  “I suspect that he will be rethinking that position fairly soon…and then, perhaps, he will ask me to create new histories for all of the City’s residents.  Happy ones, this time.  He’ll want me to fill them with memories that will make them content to live fulfilling, peaceful, non-violent lives.”  Schreber rubbed his hands together with relish.  “I must say, I’m almost looking forward to the challenge.  Just what kind of memories and personalities truly DO make human beings content?  I suspect it can’t all be puppy dogs and, ahem, holidays at Shell Beach.  My current hypothesis is that most people need to strive at least a little, to triumph against adversity, in order to feel true joy.  But I could be wrong.”  He smiled blissfully.  “No one in history has ever had a chance to find out what really makes our species happy.  I just might.  Isn’t that a wonderful thought?”

Methos felt his blood go cold.  “So you’re going to continue the Strangers’ experiment,” he said.  “Rewrite people’s memories to suit yourself and John.  Rape their minds over and over again until you get it ‘right’.”  Schreber nodded calmly.  “You really are as mad as the Strangers,” Methos said softly.  “And about a thousand times more evil.  _You_ don’t have total ignorance of human morality to excuse you.”

“Oh, no.  I certainly don’t,” Schreber agreed cheerfully.  “And I agree with you.  I _am_ much, much more evil.  But what else, I ask you, really is to be done?”  He stood up, began to pace back and forth across the office.  “We are stranded here with one another, Adam.  John _has_ set the ship on a course for Earth, but unlike the Strangers, he has only his own individual power to draw on….and that power isn’t enough to achieve any speed, not if he maintains the sun and the ocean at the same time.  It will be a millennium at least before we even reach our solar system.  And so we must make some kind of society for ourselves.  Why not attempt to make it a utopia?”  Schreber sat back down.  “John will fight it for a while.  But…as you say…eventually, all power corrupts.  Sooner or later he will tire of petty human inconveniences like boredom and greed, and authorize me to write them out of the population.  It’s funny, really.”  For the first time, Schreber looked slightly regretful.  “I hated what the Strangers did so much that I did everything I could to fight them.  And now that they are gone, I find myself becoming them.  So odd, the way that things work out…”

Methos said nothing.  That mad glint in Schreber’s eye had become even more frighteningly clear: he wondered if the doctor was still aware of his presence at all.  But a moment later, his attention snapped back to Methos’s face, and now his gaze was almost as disturbingly sane as it had been crazy a moment before.  “Anyway,” he said softly.  “That’s not why I brought you here.  Or why I returned your…shall we say, amazingly extensive?…set of memories to you intact.”

Methos felt another chill.    “Why did you, Schreber?” 

“Because I think, in the profoundest of ways, that you and I are now brothers,” Dr. Schreber said, so excited now that his words tumbled all over each other in his rush to get them out.  “I used _you_ , you know.  Your deviousness, your commitment to survival.  I took those parts of your memories and injected them into myself.  It’s the only reason I was able to survive as long as I did.  The only reason I was able to defeat them.  And now…” He looked Methos over from head to foot, in an openly appraising way that would have been sexual, if Schreber’s madness hadn’t put him so clearly beyond such things.  “And now, I think you are our only hope of salvation.”

“Salvation???”

“You will live,” Schreber answered simply.  “John must not even be allowed to know that you exist.  Your Immortality would threaten him too much.  It’s the only power in this world he cannot command.  But you _must_ live, Adam.  That thousand years it will take to reach Earth?  You alone can survive it, and tell our story to whoever still remains.”  He smiled austerely.  “And…there is one more little problem.  One I think only you can cope with.”

“Problem?”

“It is a secret,” Schreber warned.  “A very big secret.  So much so that I’m seriously pondering deleting it from my own memories, once I’ve told it to you.”

Methos shied backward.  “If you think I’m letting you near my forehead with a syringe again…”

Schreber laughed humorously.  “My friend, if I was so inclined, you couldn’t stop me,” he said.  “Remember that I am the spiritual father…and one day I’ll be his lover and life-mate as well, for who else in this world can possibly understand him?...of John Murdock.  Of the only man in this world capable of making the very earth do exactly as he bids.”  Methos flinched.  His memory of the way John had so easily commanded the walls in the stadium to hold him were still very clear.  “But there is no need for alarm,” Schreber said softly.  “For this communication, words alone will suffice.”

And he leaned forward, and began to whisper…

***

Schreber had hidden his secret far underground, in a vast Stranger-built warren of tunnels not even John Murdock could rearrange.  There were, Schreber had explained, several areas of the ship that were choom-proof.  It was simply good design that the rooms housing basic life support, propulsion, and the machinery that made chooming possible could not be remodeled mentally, lest something vital get accidently changed.  Thus, there was a second, larger, even darker city beneath the one the humans inhabited.  And it was here that Schreber’s prisoner was kept.

To Methos, the whole thing resembled nothing so much as Kronos’s New Camelot.  Oh, there were no guttering torches or cyber-punk iron furniture to be seen.  But the miles and miles of cold, dark, positively labyrinthine halls presided over by a frighteningly brilliant madman certainly put Methos in mind of it.  It was an impression that was simply heightened when he finally reached the prisoner, who was sitting alone on a plinth in the middle of a room filled with murky water, so much like Cassandra in days of old that Methos was temporarily overcome by déjà vu.  He took a deep breath, and waded through the pool.

The…man…sitting on the plinth looked so small and dejected that Methos had to work hard to remember he wasn’t human.  He was a parasitic alien entity currently animating a human corpse…as should have been made perfectly obvious by his unnatural, marble-white pallor.  Still.  The eyes that met Methos’s held so much intelligence and wry humor that it was easy to forget that the brain behind them was alien.  Compared to Schreber’s madness and the newly brainwashed zombies now inhabiting the City upstairs…Murdock had indeed resorted to returning everyone to their former, ignorant states until he and Schreber could come up with a better plan…it was a positive relief to meet a gaze that held so much self-knowledge.  Especially since the gaze was accompanied with a warm smile, oddly incongruent as it was with the snow-white skin.  “Ah, so it’s you,” Mr. Book said cordially.  “I was wondering when you’d arrive.”

“You know who I am?” 

“Dr. Schreber has filled me in,” Mr. Book.  “He does like to visit me every now and then, to gloat over my exile.  Last time, he mentioned I might have a companion soon.  Please.  Join me.”  And he moved a little way toward the side of the plinth, gesturing for Methos to climb up beside him.

Schreber had told him that the Strangers found water highly toxic.  It was generous, then, for the alien to voluntarily move closer toward it just to make room for Methos.  Methos climbed onto the plinth as carefully as he could, endeavoring to keep from splashing.  Still, he couldn’t help the fact that his boots and the lower legs of his pants were already soaked through.  Mr.  Book did not quite shy away…but he did look at where Methos’s soaked boots and pants legs were dripping onto the plinth, and shivered ever so slightly.  “My apologies,” Methos said, and instantly set about taking his boots off…setting them with his sodden socks tucked inside at the farthest edge of the plinth from Mr. Book.  His pant legs he rolled up above his knees, so the damp fabric was encased in a layer of dry.  “So it’s true then,” he said.  “Your kind really doesn’t like water.”

“Let’s just say that we find it very unpleasant,” Mr. Book answered calmly, then sighed.  “Not that there is a ‘we’ of course, not any longer.  There is just…me.”

“I know,” Methos said.  _Two of a kind, we are,_ he thought.  _In that we are both the last of our kinds.  Funny.  I never thought I’d become the One like this._ Aloud he said: “I’m not entirely sure why there’s still either one of us.  Or how.”  He waved expressively at the ceiling.  “Murdock genuinely believes he killed you, you know.”

“Ah, well.  That is easy to explain,” Mr. Book answered dryly.  “Dr. Schreber is a master memory-maker, after all.”

“You’re saying that Schreber…fabricated…Murdoch’s memory of that final battle?” 

Mr. Book nodded.  “And once the memory was created, he simply had to insert it into Mr. Murdock’s brain.”  He looked out across the dark water pensively.  “He shared it with me as well, you know.”

“That’s….”  Familiar as he was with the never-ending creativity of human cruelty, Methos was still a little taken aback by this.  It took a special kind of mind to purposely inject someone with the memory of his own death.  “That must have been difficult for you.”

“Well, I must say, I thought he could have been a _little_ more creative,” Mr.  Book said with shrug.  “Flying?  Throwing each other about?  Not to mention the ridiculous touch of making my inner form _crimson_ and three times as large as the others of my kind, when in reality, we were all identical down to the micron.  But never mind.”  Mr. Book sighed.  “The whole theatrical performance seemed to more than convince young Mr. Murdock, which is all we can really ask for.  Now, as to why Doctor Shreber felt he had to play such a charade in order to keep me alive, unbeknownst to John…well.  That, too, is easily understood.”

“Yes,” Methos agreed, nodding.  “He thought you might be useful.”

“Yes.  A master at hedging his bets, our good doctor,” Mr. Book agreed.  “First: my kind is not the only, ah, ‘alien’ species the City might encounter as it travels toward your home planet.  He felt I might be useful, should we come across one of the others.  Then, of course, there are the more immediate threats.  Threats it is as well to keep a weapon in reserve for.  Even if such a weapon must be kept isolated and secret.”

Ah, yes.  Of course.  He should have realized all along.  “You’re talking about John Murdock.”

“Indeed.”  Mr.  Book smiled demurely.  “Because the main problem with creating a super-weapon…especially a weapon as unpredictable as an individual, sentient being… is that it can so easily by turned against the creator.  Dr. Schreber wanted to keep me available, should his young protégé ever truly get out of hand.” 

“Yes.”  Methos looked down at his bare toes, wriggling them thoughtfully.  “It’s not good for there to be only one man in the world who can choom.  Better to keep another, just in case the first gets out of hand.”

The oddly human eyes regarded Methos with respect.  “Precisely.”  Mr.  Book sighed.  “Of course, there are more perils to guard against than merely John Murdock’s possible future mutiny.  Murdock knows next to nothing about how to maintain this ship.  It’s worth keeping me alive just in case of a malfunction.  But…”  Mr. Book stretched out his own feet, in conscious imitation of Methos’s posture.  “All of those are just window dressing, as you humans would say.  If you really want the good doctor’s true reason for keeping me here…well.  I suspect it is much, much simpler.” 

“He wanted to punish you.”

“Exactly.”  Mr. Book nodded.  “He felt it would be far, far crueler to keep me alive, knowing I was the last of my kind, than to kill me outright.  Not to mention that watching me live as individual…. after all the crimes I committed to achieve that very goal…seems to have suited his sense of irony.  It tickles his scientific curiosity, as well.  I believe he expected the experience of being alone in my own skull to drive me mad.  And he meant to enjoy every moment of it.”

“Why hasn’t it?” Methos waved a hand around him, at the tiny circle of dry concrete that was Mr. Book’s new home.  “Most human beings would have found living in such isolation to be absolutely intolerable.”

“Yes,” Mr. Book said sadly.  “I know that, now.”  For the first time, he looked unhappy.  “I must confess I have felt quite a few unpleasant sensations…loneliness, I think your kind would call them.  Eventually, I believe they really will drive me mad.  But for now…”  He sighed.  “For now, I am simply enjoying the quiet.  After several millennia of hearing my brothers’ every thought, you can’t imagine how peaceful the last few weeks have been.”  His lip twisted wryly.   “It’s really quite the disappointment for poor Dr. Shreber.  I had thought about recreating Ophelia’s famous mad scene from Hamlet just to make him feel better about himself, poor man.  But I’m fairly sure he’d figure out I was just humoring him.”

Methos let out a sharp bark of laughter.  Mr. Book’s joke wasn’t _that_ funny…it was gallows humor, pure and simple.  But it was such a relief to be in touch with someone still _human_ enough to make such a joke that he couldn’t help himself.  Much to Methos’s surprise, Mr. Book began to laugh as well, a high barking cackle that was inherently humorous all by itself.  When it subsided, Mr.  Book leaned back on his elbows, staring regretfully at the cavernous ceiling.  “We really didn’t understand, you know,” he said sadly.  “That what we were doing was wrong.”

“Kidnapping humans, you mean?  Stealing their dead and their memories?”  Mr. Book nodded soberly.  “No,” Methos agreed.  “I don’t think you did.”

Mr. Book blinked.  He seemed ever so slightly startled.   “That is…a remarkably generous statement to make.”

“I don’t think so,” Methos answered.  “If I have the story right, your memories…bodies, too…were all collective property, belonging to everyone, free for the taking.  So how could you possibly know how much we’d mind you taking ours?”  He shrugged loosely.  “I once lived with a small Native American tribe that had no concept of personal property.  Everything they had was freely shared with everyone else in the tribe—food, tools, horses, sex, everything.  You just took what you needed when you needed it, and that was that.  It was nearly idyllic…until the Europeans came, who didn’t understand why the tribesmen didn’t understand why simply slaughtering a sheep or a cow when they were hungry was wrong.”  Methos shivered.  “There were some very ugly deaths, because of that misunderstanding.”

“Yes,” Mr. Book said hollowly.  “There always seems to be.”

“Yes.  There always is.”  They were silent for a moment, listening to the gentle _lap lap_ of the water against the plinth.  Then Methos said: “You know, your experiment was fundamentally flawed from the start.”

“It was?  How?”

“Don’t feel bad.  It wasn’t something beings like you could really be expected to see.”  Methos clasped his hands thoughtfully over one knee. “You wanted to know what it was like to be individuals.  So…being you…you set out to acquire that knowledge the only way you knew how.  It just seemed natural to you to take the memories of those experiences directly, without ever living through them yourselves.  But that was the great mistake.”  He raised a hand to tap lightly on his forehead.  “True individuals…at least human ones, I have no idea what it’s like for the rest of the species in the universe…we can’t share memories that way.  We _can’t_ have any experiences that we don’t process through our own skins, eyes and ears.  And that means we can never truly understand what it’s like to be anybody but ourselves. We are cursed to spend eternity locked up in the prison of our own boney skulls.”  He tapped his forehead again for emphasis.  “So you see, you can’t _be_ an individual if you can memory-swap. The very tool you used to try to understand us voided the whole experiment.”

Mr. Book was quiet for a very, very long time.  When he did finally speak, there was a dry, aged quality to his voice.  For the first time, he truly sounded as old as Methos knew he had to be.  “It appears,” he said softly, “that I am being given the chance to correct that flaw in the experiment now.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.”

“I hadn’t truly realized …” And Mr. Book turned on him, his borrowed eyes alive with terrible urgency.  “How do you _stand_ it, my friend?  I understand how the others upstairs manage it.  They exist for so short a time, and the challenges of simply staying alive are so pressing, that they never have a chance to look beyond what is.  But _you_ are different.  You know what it is to live long, unending…”  His pale hands shook.  “How can you possibly face eternity, knowing you will never escape that boney prison?  Knowing you will always just be _one_?  By yourself, alone?”

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Methos answered gravely.  “It hurts, being alone in one’s own body.  It always will hurt, at least a little.  There’s no way to avoid it.”  Mr. Book pressed his eyes closed.  “But.  There are two things that can help.”

Mr. Book’s eyes flew open again.  “And what are they?”

“The first one, you’re already good at.  And you’re just going to get better at it, with practice—I can tell.  It’s what we’ve been doing since I came downstairs.”  Mr. Book raised an inquiring eyebrow.  “Conversation,” Methos explained.  “It’s how we true individuals share experience.  It must feel horribly slow and clumsy, compared to what you’re used to.  But there is an art and a beauty to it as well.  I promise you.”  He looked out over the murky water meditatively.  “Conversation…and its descendant arts of reading and writing…are the second best ways of escaping the boney prison that I know.  If you have someone to talk to, you don’t feel the walls pressing in quite so sharply.”

“Hmmmm.” Mr. Book seemed skeptical, but willing.  “Yes, I see.  It is true.  I have been considerably less…agitated, since you arrived.”  He cocked his head curiously.  “And what is the _best_ way of escaping, my odd new friend?”

Methos smiled.  “Ah, well, that’s very advanced.  You might not be ready for it yet.”

“I think I would like to try.”

“All right.  But feel free to pull away if it’s too much.”  Slowly, moving as calmly and carefully as he would have with a frightened horse, Methos reached out across the plinth.  And he took Mr. Book’s hand in his.

Funny.  He’d expected the alien’s borrowed hand to feel cold and somewhat rigid, like a body in a morgue…he was inhabiting a corpse, after all.  But despite its unnatural paleness, Mr. Book’s skin was slightly warm.  There was, and never would be, any way to mistake his hand for a true human being’s.  But still.  Mr. Book’s skin felt soft and surprisingly, astonishingly _alive…_ and Methos felt something deep inside himself relax, a fear he hadn’t fully allowed himself to realize he had suddenly ebbing away and leaving sweet relief instead.  For his part, Mr. Book looked startled, then deeply, innocently, childishly pleased.  And then he shivered, suddenly pulling his hand away.  “Ah,” he said.  “That is advanced, indeed.  Very…intense.”

“Told you.”

“I—I would like to try again.”  Mr. Book held up his hand, looking deeply vulnerable.  “Perhaps just one finger, this time?”

“All right.”  Methos extended just one finger, the pointer finger on his left hand.  After a moment, Mr. Book mirrored his gesture, and experimentally pressed his finger to his.  This time, he held the touch.  And they both relaxed and smiled. 

Methos especially.  So he wasn’t doomed to spend the next few millennia alone, untouched and unspoken to, save by human-looking zombies who could never be counted on to be the same people for two days in a row.  There was a companion here for him.  A very strange companion, yes…but in some ways, that just made it better.  Oh, the two of the them would keep an eye on what was going on upstairs, maintaining the ship and attempting to steer the City into some kind of long-term stability from behind the scenes…but the very strangeness’s between them meant that couldn’t be their prime focus.  Instead, they would have to spend centuries _learning_ about each other, talking and arguing and attempting to understand each other’s point of view.  And during the quiet times there would be comfort, silent touch and the peace of knowing they might be individuals, but they didn’t have to be alone.

Methos was more than content.

He tucked his cold bare feet under his thighs and prepared to let the next few thousand years unfold.

The End

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very, very belated Christmas gift fic for the wonderful Celebrithil, who requested a Dark City story. Hope you enjoyed it, hon!


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